Speaking of Psychology - How to recognize and combat ‘fake news,’ with Dolores Albarracin, PhD

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

When you open the newspaper, turn on the nightly news or scroll the Internet, is what you are reading and seeing true? How do you know? What is “fake news” and why does it seem to be everywhere? Dr. Dolores Albarracin explains why fake news is so compelling, and what it takes to counteract it. "Countdown News Intro" by chimerical via Freesound.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you open the newspaper or turn on the nightly news or scroll the internet, is what you are reading and seeing true? How do you know? What is fake news and why does it seem to be everywhere? Americans are worried about fake news. A 2019 poll by the Pew Research Center found that half of Americans said that made up news is a very big problem. Sixty-eight percent said it affects our confidence in government institutions and 54 percent said it is having a major impact. on our confidence in each other. But what does the research say? Why do people believe fake news?

How easily does misinformation spread? And once a person believes a lie, is it possible to convince them of the truth? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association, that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Dolores Albarasin,

a professor of psychology and business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She studies attitudes, persuasion, and behavior, and has looked at how people respond to misinformation in areas including politics, vaccines, and other health behaviors. Welcome to speaking of psychology, Dr. Albarsim. Thank you, Kim. Thanks for having me. You published a study that looked at psychologists' research on debunking, that is, changing people's minds once they've been presented with misinformation.

Once someone believes a piece of misinformation, is it possible to correct that belief? What did you find? Yes, within that study, which was published in psychological science in 2017, and this was a meta-analysis of the impact of misinformation presented in the news or similar types of print. So a lot of this is, of course, experimental work, and that was what we were after. So the meta-analysis, which is a collection of all the evidence on a problem in a quantitative way, involves collecting all the research that have been done on misinformation that's presented to somebody that is later corrected. So what is the impact of first the misinformation and second the correction itself?

So we gathered all the experiments, the information was new, the misinformation was new to participants on new issues, and then we estimated the odds that if you present misinformation, people will actually believe it. And the results show that the odds are actually quite high, 266 to 1. So that means that 99.6% of your attempt, to misinform will actually be successful.

So this is by far the strongest effects I've ever estimated in my career. So is it easy to misinform? Yeah, it's extremely easy. If you present misinformation, it will take a whole of your mind. It will stick. Can we actually correct that misinformation that we introduced? Yes. But it's not as easy as when we introduce the misinformation.

the first time, the odds of correcting properly are actually 6 to 1. That means that 86% of the time, the correction will succeed. But remember that the success rate of the misinformation is pretty close to 100% that leaves you with a gap. What are some of the strategies for correcting misinformation, and are there some that work better than others? There are a number of strategies, and these actually lead to better results overall. First, you should briefly and clearly describe the misinformation you're correcting. So you're both alluding to the initial piece that was fake, and whatever is that you want to introduce is as the true information that you would like people to remember.

then you present the correction briefly but clearly even sometimes through graphics that could be quite effective. Explain why the initial misinformation was wrong. This is key. You need to really provide complete explanations for why the new information is right and what was a problem with the initial take. So for that, what you really want is to ensure a good match between the misinformation people received and your correction. The correction has to map to the misinformation. So imagine a contemporary case like the case of emails that were supposedly found on a computer that was left for repair. So if you take this claim and you're trying to counter it, and then you say, well, there weren't any emails or that was false. Simply saying that was false, it's not going to cut it.

You need to explain how did the computer end up and where and were there emails and were there other types of emails in there? What exactly was the content and what happened? So you don't really touch on all the points and simply say, no, that wasn't really. true, it's unfounded, you're not going to successfully transform what people hand-represented to begin, and that's pretty important. So the other point is you need to be using trustworthy sources. This could sometimes be expert sources, but actually trusting the sources is even more important than expertise.

So are you having Fauci telling you what you should be hearing about the coronavirus and is he a trustworthy source for you? In addition, you need to encourage the audience to counterargue and be active with the information. The more people produce their own counterarguments, both ahead of time and at the point in which you introduce the correction, the better your results will be. So the fact that people can be critical and think deeply about the information is

extremely important. There are several very important recommendations and guidelines. For instance, the International Federation of Library Associations has a set of published guidelines that actually appear as a diagram. And they tell you you should first consider the source, what's the mission, right? What's the possible bias here? You need to really go beyond the headline because the headline can be misleading. Check the authors, do they exist?

Are they credible? So this is all regular practices that you can use to check on the information as it comes in. And so there is a recent document produced by 22 authors led by Steve Lewandowski, and I was part of this. And it's, I think, a very useful step towards providing guidelines for journalists and professionals to actually correct for misinformation. So they summarize all these aspects of how the correction can be done. So that's great for, as you say, journalists, other professionals, but you're a lot of, average person is going to be more likely to maybe look at something like snopes.com to figure out whether something is true or not. Isn't that the case? Yes, I think that's true in terms of

your own fact checking of information. But in terms of making sure that whatever corrections are issued, we have the best possible instances of those. I think the document could be important in that sense. Let's talk a little bit about how, a little more about how this is playing out in the real world. There was an article in the Washington Post recently about the Biden campaign so-called Malarkey Factory, which is their nickname for the campaign's efforts to counter disinformation online. One thing that I thought was interesting is that the staffers said in the article that a critical part of their job has been figuring out which fake stories to counter and which to ignore. Yes, it's a really interesting article and problem, and they seem to be using various efforts to combat this information in this case.

They seem to be gauging primarily the resonance of a given attack for persuadable voters, right? And I think this is a really good strategy in the sense that you're not going to really change the, ston't conservatives in this case who are pro-Trump no matter what and this is the same type of problem that we have in the health domain

and especially areas that are to polarize like that seems right you're not going to introduce persuasive messages on social media to try to change the parents who are leading the anti-vax movement right? You have absolutely no chance of producing changes. Couldn't they change? Yes, they could change maybe if they married a liberal or really alter their lives, which would take years, and that could produce a change.

But you're not going to change them through an actual message or correction, but you have a really good chance when people who are on the fence, who aren't certain who might have seen something, but they are not positive of what it was or where it came from, and therefore they are persuadable in that sense. Who are trusted sources today, though? I mean, that seems to be a big problem because at one time you might be able to say, well, the news media, New York Times, the Washington Post, those are trusted sources. But now we have all kinds of, policymakers, politicians saying they're fake news. Who do you turn to? And you mentioned Dr. Anthony Fauci as somebody who might be trusted. Is it individuals at this point? Or are there institutions that are

trustworthy sources? Yes, I think that's a really crucial problem and I wish I had answers for you. Unfortunately, you know, the level of cynicism and the population has only gone up over the years. And in the last four years, especially trust in the media has decreased tremendously as a result of all we've seen. So in general, trusted sources could involve reputable media. but if we call the reputable media now fake news factories or whatever we used to denigrate those trusted sources, then they are no longer possible correction sources for everybody at least. But there's still some people who will believe them. Yes, of course, yes.

But you're not reaching necessarily everybody in the same way. way and some people are increasingly more isolated from any formal source of information, which then allows all these other misinformation and disinformation out there to filter itself and potentially have an impact because there is a vacuum of regularly infused correct information. So in respect to the Biden campaign, I think what's key in addition to is this an audience that's persuadable, is this misinformation actionable? Or what are the behavioral implications of believing that, let's say, Biden is a socialist? Well, for some groups, that's quite important, right? So if you take Cuban Americans or Venezuelans and they see that possibility and they immediately imagine we're going to have some type of communists redeem coming in, that could be quite persuasive and that will definitely bias and shape how they vote.

In addition, there is actionable misinformation that's even more problematic, which is. is the type that was used in the 2016 campaign that was essentially suppressing the vote, right? So if you see an ad that tells you, click here to vote online, well, that is extremely problematic, much more than commenting on Biden falling asleep in a meeting, right? So I would say, yes, the potential to persuade,

but also the actionableity of the misinformation on going after whatever is clearly linked to behavior, which is not all of it. Something that interests me in particular is conspiracy theories. And I would just wonder why people believe them, even the most outlandish. And just to give one example, I mean, the 2016 Pizza Gate conspiracy theory, for example, that alleged members of the Democratic Party were running a pedophilia ring in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. Why is it that some people can believe something that is so outlandish just on its face?

Is there something that goes on in our brains? Yes, I've been fascinated by this, and I began to study that, like around 2013, and people were saying, why are you studying this? It's really not an issue. Nobody believes in this. But, of course, they want to say the same thing nowadays, right? We are seeing more and more far-fetch ideas that you couldn't imagine people would believe and they look completely science fiction-like in a lot of cases, right? But yes, people do.

It's a quarter of the population believes that the coronavirus is potentially a bioweapon, that it's a quarter of the population. believes that the coronavirus is potentially a bioweapon that escaped, or at least they did believe those kinds of things in the beginning of the pandemic. So the question of why, well, it's quite interesting, and it's led to a lot of research. And if you look at what people have said about the origins of this, Well, first of all, it can give you a pretty tight scheme to sort of tie all of your beliefs too. It explains a lot of the stress of our lives and our failures, right?

So there is one take that essentially that conspiracy beliefs take on because people are frustrated and they have been socially excluded. And now they have a great reason, right? not because of my own failures, rather there is people, lizards conspiracy out there. And of course, that power is keeping me in my current situation. However, when you look at all the possible personality variables that might explain these beliefs, they account for very little. So they don't really contribute that much. And if it were only personality, then you would imagine that we would all come up with our own unique theories, right?

For you, it would be about your neighbors, for somebody else, they would be their boss. They would look much more like pathological cases of paranoia. However, these beliefs are socially shared. So when we look at that, we really need to wonder where are the students? stories coming from, who is feeding the stories to the public. And in our own work, the origin or at least the correlates of these beliefs are exposure to the conservative media in the U.S. You also do research on misinformation around vaccines and other health behaviors.

And in one recent study, you looked at how the amount of misinformation in people's social media environments affect whether they get the flu vaccine. Can you talk a little bit about what you found? Yes. So in that study, there is, of course, information and we suspected that the anti-vax movement and vaccination hesitancy could be links to exposure to misinformation on social media. We wanted the first to actually raise that question. That question has. it's been around for a long time. And the previous work was typically work looking to see if people who have vaccine hesitancy are likely to, let's say, hang out in anti-vax groups on Facebook.

And yes, of course, that is the case. But then you don't know, is in that they all hang together because they have these beliefs or are they actually persuaded because they are in the groups. So what we wanted to do was to come up with research that could answer that question of the temporal order better. So we had two types of data. On the one hand, we collected tweets primarily on vaccine hesitancy themes. That would involve, for instance, a big pharma conspiracy and the fact that kids are damaged for the the profit of the pharmaceutical industry.

So we had those tweets and we delocated in the tweets to the U.S. county in which they were initially produced. In addition, we had a survey of 3,000 Americans who participated over time. So we had a full year of data on vaccine attitudes and vaccination behavior. So this was done when the flu shot because that's something we should all be getting all adults. And it was a good case and should actually observe influences on actual behavior. And what we found was that in general, if you live in a county that has that kind of misinformation circulating around on Twitter, later on, you're more likely to be.

disapprove of vaccines and also less likely to get a flu shot. However, if you also have discussions with friends, your physician, and it's real life network, then that effect disappears, which is important in the sense that, you know, and gives you a possible key to disarm the effects of being exposed to negative information, of that type. Which speaks again to relying on trusted sources, right?

Right. And social consensus and social proof of some sort. So what happens in situations where people believe false information, not because it's fake news, but because information changes. For example, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, reputable authorities advise the general public that they didn't need to wear masks, but that obviously changed. So how can health officials and public officials deal with situations like this? Yes, I think you're really pointing to a problem that we're not always emphasizing. We're more concerned with correct information, but in a fairly unstable situation that is a pandemic. And for a new disease, in this case, this situation of.

having to correct your own information, which was true at that time, is essentially, you know, in monthly occurrence, right, in different ways. So the psychological processes are the same. So whether you're correcting false or true information at the time, you know, they're both false right now. So you're going to need to go to the same trouble of experience. explaining why we didn't believe we needed masks and now we do what has changed and what was actually correct in the time. So you need to try to control the damage and not allow for your change in perspective to essentially cast doubt over the entire understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So the corrections need to repeat the misinformation, whatever. you believed earlier, in the same way with the same complete explanations, but by trustworthy sources that you need in the case of correcting for misinformation. So this is, of course, also something that we're seeing in the vaccine trials, right? And probably what you need to do is anticipate that this is a new field. we don't know enough and we're likely to change the point of view as we go. So with that in mind, you can proactively control the potential damage of these changes. So there will be different ways, but one might be to really elaborate on, well, at this point, this is what we believe,

or at this point there is a halt in the clinical trial, but this is, something that happens regularly and it doesn't mean that if three months from now the vaccine appears and it's demonstrated to be efficacious, that doesn't mean that, you know, this event is not invalidating that other conclusion that we might reach down the line. So I think that's the critical piece here to be anticipating the future when you are communicating. communicating information in areas as consequential as public health and also that are in flux. One study that came out this year in the journal Science found that fake news itself was actually not as prevalent as we might think. The researchers concluded that actual fake news comprised only 0.15% of the average Americans news diet.

I'm so curious to get your thoughts on this. I mean, how big a problem is fake news? And is it still a problem if the actual percentage of all the fake news within the news universe is really quite low? I thought it was a great piece that it really challenged that idea that we're drowning in fake news. And I would tend to agree because their conclusion is that, yes, I mean, people are clearly misinformed, right? even if we're only finding that 0.15% of the news are fake, well, the public is still dramatically misinformed in a lot of areas, right? If you look at political knowledge, health knowledge, and so on.

So when they conclude is that the sources of misinformation are probably not the fake news posts online, but rather the media, other people, you know, the regular sources with which we interact. And I couldn't agree more with this. So first you have a problem of lack of information and exposure to bias media. That's a serious and more prevalent problem. This is confirmed by, you know, much research,

including our own. So if you measure associations between, let's say, conspiracy beliefs in the area of COVID-19 and social media or regular media, conservative, liberal mainstream, exposure to social media or social media usage is uncorrelated with those beliefs, but exposure to Fox News is. So I agree in that sense that both the amount, but also the impact, as we know it, is much higher for media than fake news per se. So that's part. But of course, 0.15% could still have an impact in some cases. And when it comes to something like an election, we're talking about a very, very, very, small margins. So even the point 15, and especially certain types of point 15, like the case of

click to vote online, that could be quite damaging. And I think it makes sense to prepare for that, even if the threat is not as prevalent in terms of its size. Do you have advice for a lay person? Most of the people who listen to this podcast, They're not psychologists or journalists. How should they determine whether what they're reading and seeing out there in the world right now is true? Yes, I think there are two aspects and probably paying attention to what you're reading and slowing down is one. But generally, it all comes down to certain behavioral skills. for any other behavior.

So if you think of changing your diet, right, what do we do to teach people to change what they eat? Well, you tell them how to shop and what choices to make and so on. And I tell them don't shop on the 7-Eleven down the street or don't shop when you're hungry. So for media diets, we have the same exact problem. So the first thing to communicate and to train people in is that Facebook and YouTube are the equivalent of McDonald's body indicates of your media diet. So you should not be using either of those or social media as the main sources of news. If you see something on Twitter, go read it on the New York Times page because that's an actual reputable source of news.

information on actual events. So that would be probably the number one aspect, where to consume the news and then the strategies of check parallel sources, don't stay with just one and slow down. But I think the number one would be don't read news on Facebook. Go to a newspaper. That's excellent advice. I appreciate you're giving it to our listeners, and I want to thank Thank you for joining us today. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology.org

or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. That's Speaking of Psychology, all one word, at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condyenne. Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.